Like many retired teachers, we taught through the Troubles and turned up every day for our pupils at school

(The article can be read here: ‘It was tone deaf to increase teacher pay when schools are out so long’)

I have just subscribed to the News Letter because you seem to be one of the few media outlets free from Covid-19 hysteria.

I am a retired teacher and I couldn’t agree more with Ben regarding the attitude of teachers to returning to work.

What risk to their lives are they really facing?

They need to get past the hysteria and look at the facts. The chances of any teacher even getting the disease let alone dying from it are minimal for the vast majority and as regards the risk to their children, it is virtually non existent.

To use their safety as an excuse is beyond contempt. However, I know that there are many teachers who want to get back to the children they love, they just need to stand up to union bullies on a power trip.

I taught in a grammar school in Northern Ireland.

I was devoted to my pupils and spent many nights until late putting together material to give them the best chance of a good A-level grade and they didn’t hesitate to show their appreciation. Some of them are now in their 50s and would never pass me in the street or anywhere else without saying hello.

When I joined the profession in 1971 it was referred to as a vocation. I don’t hear it called that any more.

Like my retired colleagues, I taught through most of the Troubles. We turned up every day through checkpoints, bomb scares and for some of us, worse. I vividly remember on my way home driving round a corner to be confronted by a car, a green Morris Minor, with full headlights on and all four doors open, an indicator of a car bomb.

Once I drove into the immediate aftermath of an IRA/army shootout. This was nothing to what some teachers were faced with in those days.

Yet our main concern was always the welfare of our pupils. Similarly, we see some of our NHS heroes weeping on television. We forget too easily the nurses and doctors who for 25 years worked in front line hospitals dealing with shattered bodies, some of them the same age as their own children and dying in front of them.

None of them ever appeared on TV crying that ‘This wasn’t what I signed up for’.

In the long term, the News Letter will be shown to be right and other media outlets will be the gutless reporting of outlets such as the BBC will come back to haunt them.

JT, Co Londonderry (full name and address supplied)

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